Opening with a pertinent but in-plain-sight quote from The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, in whose play a character forbiddingly refers to the dread of letting in the so-called young people, While We’re Young tries to bring to its thematic elements a coherence and a sense of character that should be the preserve of a more textured and multifarious film. This is still the case—While We’re Young tarnishes its lighthearted comedy by pointing up its all-too-important division between youth and age, making of its second half something of a lark highlighting its risible seriousness and how hard it’s trying to make its point.
But pointing up its themes is not the hallmark of a great movie; it could in fact be that of a terrible movie, making what should be the authentic effortlessness of a work of art into a contrived and self-consciously intellectual piece of shlock. Saved from this misfortune, While We’re Young buoys itself with good acting and good dialogue, and because its dénouement takes up only the last twenty minutes or so of the film, which until then cuts through its thematic clangor with the lightness of wind chimes singing in the breeze.
Where exactly does it go wrong? Played as a gangly and self-obsessed runt of a filmmaker by Adam Driver, Jamie exemplifies the callous and manipulative entitlement supposed by the film to be something endemic to the youth of our time, and he is the perfect foil to Ben Stiller’s down-to-earth mediocrity, intelligence, and integrity of character; but While We’re Young so hammers the point of Jamie’s youthful entitlement that he seems by the end less of a character, and more of a symbol of what the director wanted to represent as youth in contrast with middle-aged integrity. Turning a character into a symbol isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t good—it would be lopping off one leg of a table so that the imbalance becomes palpable.
Perhaps While We’re Young would have been better had Ben Stiller been less pathetically insecure, or Adam Driver more individualized as a character so that he had some semblance of a complexity of intentions, ambivalence, or conflict. But in any case, the film would have been better—period.
